Meeting a namesake

It was the fourth time I was meeting Vikram Seth after we had decided that March the 13 was an auspicious day. The other three had been professional visits, and this time he was on a personal visit to home. At the first meeting, he was excited that I was his namesake, for he was called Amit in his childhood. I never had thought before this that Amit is a very exciting name, for whenever you turn back hearing this name, someone else is being called. It is a coincidence that a series of short stories that I had written have a common protagonist called Vikram. Interestingly, there’s a Vikram Seth poem called Distressful Homonyms, and I am more than tempted to quote the first six lines from the poem:

Since for me now you have no warmth to spareI sense I must adopt a sane and spare Philosophy to ease a restless stateFuelled by this uncaring. It will state A very meagre truth: love like the restOf our emotions, sometimes needs a rest.

So we met to exchange greetings and ideas two days before the Ides of March at his Noida house. I cannot reach on time. So even though I had been waiting for days, I did not reach on time, and told him the traffic police had foiled my efforts. His wry smile told me he thought otherwise, but he was least irritated. “Let’s take a walk in the park, otherwise we’ll not be able to talk,” he said. So we went to the park and again decided that clockwise was a better direction to move in.

The subject of being Humnaan always comes in, and I was reminded of the poem quoted above. “Oh that was written when I was your age you know, the time when one is lovelorn,” he chuckled. His looked off into another time. I wondered what it would have been to drop out of a Stanford PhD after ten years of being in it, to decide to take destiny’s call of being a writer, when you were already past your twenties.

Vikram listened to me intently as if I were a close friend as I rambled about Alice’s grave in Pune with haunting epitaph, an Anglo-Indian beggar who spoke queen’s English, a military coup in a steel city, short story as a lost form. And he gave me the first lesson on becoming a writer, “When you staple pages, do not staple them diagonally on the left hand corner. They tear away.” I had taken a book for an autograph in which he signed as ‘Amit.’